John C. Stennis

John Cornelius Stennis (3 August 1901-23 April 1995) was a US Senator from Mississippi from 5 November 1947 to 3 January 1989, succeeding Theodore Bilbo and preceding Trent Lott.

Biography
John Cornelius Stennis was born in Kemper County, Mississippi in 1901, and, while attending law school, he was elected to the State House as a Democrat, serving from 1928 to 1932. He went on to serve as a prosecutor and state judge before serving in the US Senate from 1947 to 1989 as a segregationist Southern Democrat, and he signed the Southern Manifesto in opposition to Brown v. Board of Education and voted against the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, and the establishment of Martin Luther King, Jr. day as a holiday. He retired from the Senate in 1989 at the age of 88 and died in Jackson, Mississippi in 1995 at the age of 93.